COLIN JAGER
Shelley After Atheism
But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power.
-Edmund
O
F THE MAJOR ROMANTIC WRITERS,
Burke'
PERCY SHELLEY IS MOST READILY
associated with atheism. The word was still an epithet in the early
nineteenth century, yet Shelley courted it. The Necessity of Atheism, the
18i I pamphlet that got Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg kicked out of
Oxford, recapitulated familiar arguments from Locke and Hume; the title
itself, however, had the desired effect. Five years later, when Shelley signed
hinself in the hotel registers in Chamonix and Montanvert as "Democrat,
2
Philanthropist, and Atheist," it was the final word that caused the uproar.
For in the history of early modern thought in the West "atheism" is an almost magical word.
This essay is about Shelley's poem Mont Blanc, though I will have little to
say about the content of that poem. This is only in part because a great
many intelligent things have already been said about it. It is also because in
this poem content is not really the issue. Indeed, the best gloss on Shelley's
poem is an oft-quoted passage from Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious:
History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone
which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of
representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is
not ...
a type of content, but rather the inexorable forn of events, ...
Thanks to David Collings, William Galperin, and audiences in North Carolina ard Wisconsin for their responses to earlier versions of this essay.
i. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) 9.
2. On The Necessity of Atheisni, see Michael Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical
Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982) 42; on
the hotel register, see Martin Priestman, Roinantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 232; Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice not Understood
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977) 141; and Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London:
Harper Collins, 1974; 1995) 340, 342. Byron apparently tried to scratch out Shelley's entry.
News of the inscription reached England by way of Robert Southey. For good measure,
Shelley entered "L'Enfer" (Hell) under "destination" in the register.
SiR, 49 (Winter 20o0)
611
612
COLIN JAGER
the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an "absent cause." Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what
refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis ....
[T]his history can be apprehended only through its effects ....
This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground
and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us,
however much we mnight prefer to ignore them.3
Mont Blanc's obscure meditations on power, necessity, and death have sent
critics scurrying for source texts, but Jameson suggests that "necessity is not
a type of content." No content: only experience, which takes the form of
history. To read history we look to its effects, what the poem calls the
"flood of ruin" that spills down the mountain. Or, as Shelley puts it a few
lines later, "the power is there, / The still and solemn power of many
sights, / And many sounds, and much of life and death." 4
Atheism as Unbelief
With Shelley's poem as my inspiration, I want to work my way back to
Jameson's distinction between content and experience, particularly its reference to Spinoza and the milieu of the radical enlightenmient. My argument will be that Shelley is actually superior to the radical enlightenment
on this score because he is able to leave its atheism behind. In Chamonix's
hotel register and in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley hints at a radical embodiment that goes some way toward undoing atheism's longstanding association with heroic freethought.
Because this is a rather counter-intuitive argument, it will be best to begin on familiar ground. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the heavily-touristed Vale of Chamonix was thought to facilitate religious awe, even perhaps to cure atheists of unbelief Such notions inspired
Coleridge's "Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chaniouni," which offered this thought as part of its lengthy headnote when it first appeared in
1802: "Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders!'"I
Notoriously, Coleridge had never in fact been to Chamonix; even more
3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 198i) io2.
4. Percy Shelley, "Mont Blanc; Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni," lines 107, 12729. Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002). Hereafter SPP.
5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (London: Penguin,
1997) 562. The poem first appeared in the Morning Post in September of r8o2. On the popularity of Chamonix for religious pilgrimage, see Robert M. R-yan, The Romantic Refornmation:
Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 196;
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
613
notoriously, his poem partly plagiarizes Sophie Christiane Friedericke
Brun's much shorter poem on the same subject. 6 When Shelley signs the
hotel register "Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist," then, he is not only
resisting the conventional piety to which Coleridge had given voice; like
the subtitle added for the poem's 1817 publication, "Lines Written in the
Vale of Chamouni," Shelley's signature in the guest book marks the fact
that he was there, and thinking for himself. Thus Mont Blanc's atheism betokens liberty: freedom from a past marked by complacency, sentimentality,
and lack of originality.
Putting it like this slots Shelley's atheism into the tradition of freethought
that Jonathan Israel has taught us to call the "radical enlightenment."7 Yet
"Mont Blanc" is not a poem of the radical enlightenment in any simple
sense. Indeed, critics have generally seen Shelley's poems of late 1815 and
1816 as supplementing Godwin and Voltaire with more "romantic" fare.
Godwin thought that people must be talked into revolution reasonably and
carefully. By contrast, Shelley is by this point in his career suggesting that
people need to experience change imaginatively before they can learn its
principles intellectually. Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Coleridge begin to
appear more often in his writing.' This inaugurates the strategy that he describes most clearly in the "Preface" to Prometheus Unbound: "The imagery
which I have employed," he writes there, "will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind, or
from those external actions by which they are expressed" (SPP 207). According to the usual gloss, Shelley is here suggesting that revolutions do indeed happen mentally, but that Godwin was wrong to think that the contents of one mind could be simply transferred to another. The only way to
grasp mental revolution is through the mediation of the outward scene.
In a general way this is what we mean by "Romanticism," if we mean
anything at all: rather than saying that his mind is like nature, the poet says
that nature is like his mind, and accordingly that the best way of understanding what is going on there is to look at the outer scene. This is how
M. H. Abrams laid it out in Natural Supernaturalism,and if Abrams saw this
as a humanizing and therefore secularizing technique, it was secularization
of a particularly "spiritual" sort. Earl Wasserm-an, in a roughly parallel fashHolmes, Shelley 340; Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005) 87-90.
6. Ryan, Romantic Reformation 197; Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1989) 334-35.
7. Jonathan 1. Israel, Radical Enlightemnient: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity j65o175o (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Hereafter RE.
8. Scrivener 7, 79. Also Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1969) 7.
614
COLIN JAGEP,
ion, influentially interprets Shelley's "turn" of 1815/1806 as a shift from
materialism to idealism. 9 For many years now, the political effects of this
tendency to spiritualize or idealize the landscape have been a pressing critical question. Was the first generation's political apostasy a necessary result of
an idealizing poetic theory, or merely a contingent one? That seems the
crucial question for Shelley in Chamonix's Vale, invoking Coleridge in order to turn him upside down.
Yet to approach the matter at this level is to find oneself entangled in the
question of religion in ways that limit what a poem like Mont Blanc might
do. Wasserman's readings of the poem are an excellent case in point, for after his subtle meditation on the relationship between skepticism and idealism, he concludes that however we decide the outcome, and however we
read the poem's final rhetorical question, the thing itself remains "implicitly religious" (238). 1 think that Wasserman is correct here, though not
quite for the reasons he thinks. The poem is not "implicitly religious" because it preserves a posture of submission (to Necessity, rather than to
God), nor because it is an example of the via negativa, but because any interpretation of the poem that concentrates on its various epistemological
conundrums will eventually find itself running up against the question of
our knowledge of God. A reading that aims to extract the poem's cognitive
content-that is, a reading that sets itself the task of figuring out what beliefs or unbeliefs the poem expresses-tangles itself up in the question of
religion, even if the reading concludes that the poem "expresses" atheism.
To see why this is so, consider a basic tension in the history of modem
atheism. Long before there were acknowledged atheists there were numerous refutations of atheism, and this curious fact can be explained in two
very different ways. Some intellectual historians infer atheism's presence in
the early enlightenment from the arguments of those writing against it.10
And so from the numerous seventeenth-century pamphlets declaring atheism to be inpossible and incoherent, Jonathan Israel and others conclude
that there must have been atheists around then, even though none of them
would confess to it. Why bother to critique, refute, and ridicule something
that doesn't exist? Atheism must be there somewhere. By emphasizing the
tradition of freethought, this story makes atheism external to religion, and
9. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York: W. W. Norton, M97I); Earl R Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971).
to. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment; and David Beniian, A History of Atheism in Britain
from Hobbes to Russell (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Particularly in the earlymodem period, accusations of atheism tend to travel under other names: Epicurianism, Naturalism, Hobbsianism, Spinozism. Sometimes it was simply shorthand for heresy or heterodoxy.
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
615
also pushes its origin back to the late seventeenth century, and the nilieu of
Spinoza, Hobbes, and varieties of non-providential deism. Atheists, in this
story, are the intellectual heroes of their age.
Alan Kors, by contrast, offers a different answer to the question of why
there were so many reffitations of atheism if there were no atheists. The
educational method of early modern Europe, notes Kors, was scholastic
disputatio, which rewarded speculative ingenuity. Theologians and other
university-educated intellectuals "were taught, formally and informally, to
generate 'objections' to all of their ... cherished beliefs, indeed ... to anticipate the strongest possible objections and to overcome these.""' In this
world the "atheist" serves a number of crucial rhetorical functions; his arguments had to be rehearsed, examined, and entertained, even if only to be
at last triumphantly refuted. Early-modern theists, then, were the source or
even the creators of the atheism they refuted. At this discursive level, Kors
demonstrates, atheism was "ubiquitous" (96) in the early modern world.
Rather than lurking in the recesses of the mind, waiting for the moment
when it can finally be confessed, atheism is created by the very act of looking for it.
Kors argues that a background shift then tunis such discursive atheism
from a rhetorical possibility into a possible identity. That shift is the Cartesian geometric method, designed and implemented to combat the very
habit of scholastic disputatio that had constructed atheism as a rhetorical position. Distancing himself from quarrelsome students and their habit of
contesting everything but not progressing toward firmer knowledge, Descartes complained that "one cannot imagine anything so strange or unbelievable . . . that it has not been said by some plilosopher.'"12 Scholastic
shouting matches seemed to matter even more during the Thirty Years
War when disputatio moved out of the lecture hall and onto the battlefield.
Returning in the nmidst of the war to his army post in Geirany, Descartes
famously paused and turned inward: "the onset of winter held me up," he
writes in the Discourse on Method, "[and] finding no conversation with
which to be diverted and, fortunately, having no worries or passions which
troubled me, I remained for a whole day by myself in a small stove-heated
room, where I had complete leisure for communing with my thoughts"
(ri.). Those thoughts famously yielded the command to reason only according to a method, since so many of our pre-reflective beliefs about the
world turn out to be groundless. In the new world struggling to be born,
one without the organizing structures of Christendom, peace requires that
ii. Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 165--1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) 53.
12. Fken6 Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett,
198o) 16. Orig. pub.
t637.
616
COLIN JAGER
human consensus be secured at a cognitive rather than institutional level.
Descartes' project thus helped to insure the legitimacy of an increasingly
mentalistic conception of religion in the early modern period. For the believer, salvation seemed more and more to hang on a method: on having
the right beliefs, and on assenting to them in the right way. For the scholar,
meanwhile, religion became an object of knowledge to be tabulated, compared, and understood along the lines being mapped out by the natural sciences.1 3 It thus becomes possible to speak of "religions," in the plural, as
distinct but relatable "things" that people or cultures "have."
This early-modem transformation of religion into a set of cognitive beliefs makes atheism in our modern sense possible. Thus when David
Berman argues in his authoritative History of Atheism in Britain that atheism
was "repressed" and "covert" in early modern England, but could finally
be "avowed" in the 178os, he misses the historical change that really matters.14 If atheism becomes an expressible belief at a certain historical moment, this is not simply because restrictions have finally lifted but because
an entire background picture is slowly changing so that it becomes possible
to think in terms of beliefs and their avowal.
Consider the cognate term "infidelity," probably the most common synonym for "atheist" during the romantic era. As both Talal Asad and Wilfred Cantwell Smith have noted,fides (faith) carries with it the sense of trust
in something or someone. For most of Christian history, therefore, an
"infidel" was someone in a moral rather than epistemological predicament;
he hasn't so much lost a "belief" as he has violated a relationship. Accordingly, infidelis had a wide range of meanings within Latin Christendom.
One category included non-Christians, especially Muslims. Heretics and
blasphemers made up other categories; since they refused to acknowledge
the authority of the Pope in Rome, schismatics like Eastern Orthodox
Christians m-ight count as infidels; finally, there were the many lax and impious Latin Christians, This range of categories meant a correspondingly
wide range of discourse about infidels. Non-Christians figure predominandy in law and poetry, while heretics, blasphemers, and schismatics appear in polemical and theological writings, including the Inquisition. Latin
Christians assailed by doubts or laziness, meanwhile, are primarily the objects of pastoral discourse. The point to emphasize here is the wide spec13.
Peter Harrison, 'Religion' and the religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 199o). Much of modern atheism conveniently forgets that "religion" is a
cultural and historical construct; as a glance at the relevant anthropological literature suggests,
it is not a natural kind. See Colin Jager, "Romanticism/Secularization/Secularism," Blackwell
Literature Compass 5 (2oo8), and E. N. Anderson, "Attachment and Cooperation in Religious
Groups," Current Anthropology 51.3 (June 2o0o): 421-23.
14. Berman 3, 1io. Also Priestman, Romantic Atheism 7.
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
617
trum of attitudes, habits, dispositions, and cultural locations ranged under
the category of infidelity. Infideles does not describe an internal, cognitive
state of unbelief, or atheism. Asad concludes that to approach infidelity
through the lens of belief is simply to miss that it was not an "epistemological concept describing an object of choice" but rather an "emotional
disposition [ ] embedded in social and political relationships.1"15
Once "religion" has narrowed and deepened, however, and once its
chief philosophical questions are epistenological (questions of knowledge)
rather than ontological (questions of virtue, holiness, and right living), then
atheism in our modern sense of unbelief becomes not only possible but intellectually appealing. For if God is needed mostly as a supernatural object
of belief-rather than as a sustaining presence within the creation, as he is
for example in Aquinas--he still has to be fitted somehow into a world that
apparently works without him. The foremost answer to this challenge was
to reconceive God as a benevolent designer of a mechanistic universe. But
whatever the precise solution, we have crossed a conceptual Rubicon: if
it was once important to fit the things of this world into a theory of the divine, it now seems necessary to fit divinity into the things of this world. At
his best God is now superfluous; at his worst, pen-icious.16
Charles Taylor puts this point in a slightly different way. In the early
modern period, he proposes, beliefs came to be understood as accompanied
by their construal, so that even the most devout took up a third-person relation to them. People began to understand themselves as agents who have
beliefs. In A Secular Age, Taylor calls this a shift toward the disenchanted
world: a world of "buffered selves," where religious belief is an increasingly
cognitive faculty. Initially undertaken with the aim of strengthening
Christianity by clarifying areas of doctrinal and moral disagreement, such
cognitively-construed belief eventually renders Christianity irrelevant to
large swaths of human experience. Militant about policing thoughts and
boundaries, doctrinal belief gradually disinvests in the social whole and
withdraws from the network of activity, practice, commnunity, and routine
where religious thoughts had been embedded. Largely the product of a
zealously reform-minded Christianity, this process of disenchantment ushers us into the modern secular age." Taylor makes this argument with great
nuance over the course of a very long book, but if he is right then it turns
out that atheism, far from opposing Christianity, is a very Christian con15. Talal Asad, "Thinking about Religious Belief and Politics," in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, forthcoming. See also Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987).
16. See Gavin Hyman, "Atheism in Modem History," in Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 27-46 (42).
17. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007).
618
COLIN JAGER
cept. It arises in the early modern period because of a series of shifts within
Western Christendom. As a corollary, this line of reasoning reveals atheism
as a belief-a negative one-as thin as its thoroughly epistemologized rival.
Not only is atheism a Christian concept, then: it is brittle and shallow in
the very same way that epistemologically-driven Christianity is brittle and
shallow. As Blake might say, this history has been adopted by both parties."8
If Kors and Taylor are right, and modern atheism is part of the tale of a
secular age that is itself the result of shifts within Christianity, then the role
of the radical enlightenment in fostering atheism must be a very minor one.
If atheism is part of the fabric of Christian culture rather than its inveterate
opponent, it cannot matter very much if a couple of freethinking Epicureans insist that atoms swerve in the void or that motion adheres in matter.
And thus the tension noted above: either atheism is a heroic resistance to
the reactionary forces of Christendom, or atheism is simply one of the ways
that Christianity ushers in the modern age.
Shelley's Radical Enlightenment
Between the Necessity of Atheism and the signature in the hotel registry,
Shelley's readings, references, and allusions offer a crash course in freethinking radicalism. Some of his criticisms of Christian monotheism come
from Gibbon, and he adapts his arguments against proofs of God from
Hume. Godwin, Paine and Wollstonecraft turn up consistently. But Shelley's reading during this period' also taps into two longstanding traditions of
radical continental thought. The first is the tradition of religious syncretism, especially as redacted in Volney's Ruins, which Shelley read in 1812.
The first English translation of Volney had appeared in 1792 (published by
Joseph Johnson), and the book had a direct influence on Tom Paine,
Thomas Spence, Blake, and on the various members of what lain McCalman has called London's "radical underworld." 19 The second tradition is
that of Epicurianism, transmitted through the several Lucretius revivals and
then through d'Holbach's Syst6ne de la nature (1770).3 All of this material,
i8. One reason, perhaps, why the "debate" initiated by the so-called "New Atheists"
(Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et. al.) is so boring.
19. lain McCalrnan, Radical Undenvorld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographersin London, i795-184o (Oxford: Oxford UP, r988). On Godwin's influence see Priestman 29-34 and
Scrivener, chapters i and 2.
20. England experienced its first "Lucretius revival" in the t68os; the first full translation
of De Reruni Naturae (by Thomas Creech) appeared in 1682. The years 1796 to 1813 witnessed a new wave of translations and editions of Lucretius, beginning with Gilbert Wakefield's edition of 1796. D'Holbach's Systene arrived between these two revivals, and had its
own influence on the English scene; a pamphlet entitled Aij Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to
a Philosophical Unbeliever (1782), which David Berman identifies as the first work of
"avowed" atheisnm in Britain, quotes long passages of d'Holbach's Systenme.
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
619
and much more besides, found its way into the clandestinely-circulated
Queen Mab (-8 12), whose notes reprinted a modified version of the Necessity of Atheism and one of whose triumphal lines declares: "There is no
God!" 2" Queen Mab "must not be published under pain of death, because it
is too much against every existing establishment," wrote Harriet Shelley to
her Dublin friend Catherine Nugent. "Do you [know] any one that would
22
wish for so dangerous a gift?"
Yet Shelley comes late to dte "New Philosophy" that had roiled elite
European cultural circles for over i5o years. Reading through this material,
and reading the accounts of it in such books as Michael Scrivener's Radical
Shelley and Martin Priestman's Romantic Atheism, one is struck by how little
has changed from the mid- and late-seventeenth century, when the radical
enlightenment first began to seep into Europe's intellectual life. Jonathan
Israel brilliantly traces the secret networks, coteries, and groupings of the
radical enlightenment, the clandestine circulation of its ideas, its characteristic modes of diversion, denial, and prevarication in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. After reading Israel, perusing accounts of
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century radicals feels rather familiar;
here are the same pseudonyms, the same anonymity, the same clandestine
circulation, the same confusion that had characterized the radical enlightenment's first flowering. Ironically enough, the hostile reviewers in the
British periodical press are correct when they admit Shelley's "genius"
while repudiating his "philosophy." John Gibson Lockhart, for example,
notes wearily that Shelley's notions recur "[i]n every age.'23 'Whatever
Lockhart's motivations, his judgment is historically accurate. In terms of
philosophical sophistication or new arguments, d'Holbach and Volney,
Paine and Godwin, are for the most part offering ideas already available to
continental initiates by i68o or thereabouts. The period after T75o, as Israel
writes, was "basically just one of consolidating, popularizing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier" (RE 7).
This was also Shelley's view of the matter. In A Philosophical View of Reform he praises the "new epoch" of the mid- and late seventeenth century,
"marked by the commencement of deeper enquiries into the point of human nature than are compatible with an unreserved belief in any of those
popular mistakes upon which ...
systems of faith .
.
. with all their super-
21. Queen Allab 7, line 13, The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews,
2 vols. (Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2o00) 1: 331.
22. Holmes, Shelley 2oo-2oi; for the general discourse of atheism in England around the
turn of the century, see Priestman's Romantic Atheism.
23. John Gibson Lockhart, unsigned review, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (January
181.9) iv: 475-82; Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London and Boston:
Routledge, 1975) 115-16.
620
COLIN JAGER
structure of political and religious tyranny, are built." Locke, Hume and
Hartley are, by contrast, "exact ... but superficial," while the French philosophes developed only "those particular portions of the new philosophy"
that were "most popular." "[T]hey told the truth, but not the whole
truth," Shelley concludes.24
If the "New Philosophy" that Shelley channels is no longer very new,
however, there has now been a revolution enacted in its name. Israel demonstrates that the radical enlightenment arrived in France by means of a
"coterie of radical-minded Huguenots in the Netherlands" (RE 3o6). By
1719 Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus had been published clandestinely in French, together with a biography of the philosopher and a
popularization of his system wherein, writes Israel, "philosophy becomes a
veritable engine of war, a battering-ram with which to smash down the
theological foundations of ancien regime culture and society."25 Here
Spinoza emerges as the theorist of radical republicanism, "with its uncompromising anti-monarchism and egalitarian tendency, a tradition which
sprang up on the continent and leads in direct line of descent to the revolutionary rhetoric of Robespierre and the French Jacobins" (RE 22). While
Hobbes and Locke regard the state of nature as brutal and unequal and
view private property as the foundation of liberty rather than its undoing,
Spinoza held that appropriation of the land was a denial of natural liberty.
Rousseau may have rejected Spinoza's metaphysics but he adopted his political theory, and the notion that equality is basic to the state of nature
makes its way into the Discourse on Inequality and thence to Robespierre.
From this perspective the Revolution is really an outworking of a radical
intellectual tradition of the late seventeenth century.
Whether or not Israel overstates Spinoza's actual influence, his book reveals the degree to which the radical enlightenment's robust concept of liberty, formulated most powerfully in the Tractatus, would shape the French
Revolution. Freedom is the "freedom to philosophize," the "freedom to
think and to say what one thinks," writes Spinoza. 26 Because, like private
property, religion curtails such freedom, it must be regulated in the name of
freedom. If for Locke religious freedom is the example of freedom par excellence, for Spinoza "religious freedom" is virtually an oxymoron. In short,
there is at work in Spinoza a specific anthropology-a picture of the human as "naturally" unfettered by religion and by property--and a theory of
State power as something that may be legitimately employed to promote
that anthropology and to sideline alternatives to it. This is why Spinoza can
24. Percy Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, ed. Thomas William Rolleston (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1920) 7-8; 8; 9.
25. RE 306; the work in question is "L'Esprit de Mr Benoit de Spinosa."
26. Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-PoliticalTreatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael
Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) 195. Hereafter TTP.
SHELLEY AFTER- ATHEISM
621
write that "we have established it as absolutely certain that theology should
not be subordinate to reason, nor reason to theology, but rather that each
has its own domain" (TTP 19o), but assert almost imlmediately that since
theology "determine[s] only what is necessary for obedience" (TTP 19o) it
has nothing to do with the freedom that the ideal state will promote: "if no
one were obliged by law to obey the sovereign power in matters that he
thinks belongs to religion . . . on this pretext everyone would be able to
claim license to do anything. Since by this means the law of the state is
wholly violated, it follows that the supreme right of deciding about religion, belongs to the sovereign power" (TPP 206-7). In this formulation,
religion always potentially conflicts with state power. Here is a crncial intellectual source of the militant secularism of the French Revolution,
which became official policy with the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of
t790: a generous acknowledgement of separate domains on the one hand,
and on the other a patrolling of that boundary so vigilant as to create the
conditions of its violation. The radical enlightenment bequeaths to the
Revolution an image of an activist secular state; it proposes to police religion in the effort to secure a space free from it.
In a widely-cited essay, Charles Taylor describes a similar contrast between the two models of secularism that emerged in early modern Europe.
The first is a Lockean "common ground" model, which begins by assuming that most people are naturally religious and consequently strives for
evenhandedness among this variety. The picture here is of a miiinalist
state adjudicating among a variety of metaphysical orientations, and it finds
its intellectual home in the moderate enlightenment's desire to modify the
confessional state without overturning the social order. This is a basically
theological conception of secularism, forged in order to bring peace to
warring Protestant sects; famously, Locke wouldn't extend toleration to
atheists. Taylor's second model, which he terms the "independent ethic,"
begins with a non-religious anthropology; it assumes that "the state of nature is not to be confused with the state of religion" (TTP 205) and holds it
best to construct a society "as if" there were no God. Taylor traces this
idea to Hugo Grotius, but Spinoza is an even more plausible candidate; indeed, orthodox commentators often lumped both Dutchmien together as
"atheistic" Biblical scholars. 27
According to the secularism of the moderate enlightenment, then, citi27. Radical Eniglitenment 447, 454. Charles Taylor, "Modes of Secularism," in Secularism
and its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998) 31-53. For Israel's comments
on the Lockean model, see RE io8, 116, tH7. Despite modifications over the years, the
Lockean and Grotian/Spinozist models remain the models for how we think about secularism today. Their most familiar forms in contemporary Europe are, respectively, the multicultural model common in Great Britain and the Netherlands, and the assinilationist model that
has characterized French secularism since the Revolution, generally referred to as laicitd.
622
COLIN JAGER,
zens possess religious beliefs the way they possess property, namely by
right, and the state agrees to leave religion alone as long as religion leaves
politics alone. According to the secularism of the radical enlightenment, by
contrast, property and religious belief linmit freedom, and consequently the
state gets actively involved in the organization of both by trying to influence the choices people make.28 If secularism just is the principle of neutrality among competing metaphysical notions, then the state's role is limited
to abstention and even-handedness; but if secularism describes a certain
formation of the citizen, then more intrusive measures may be required.
Just as in Spinoza's Tiactatus, the first of these tends in practice to slide into
the second. When in 2003 the French government outlawed the wearing
of "religious symbols" in French schools, the language of the Stasi report
insisted that the state had no power over spiritual choices. But, just as in the
Civil Constitution of 1790, the state retains the right to say where and how
its principles are threatened.
As we know, for Shelley the French Revolution was the "master theme"
of the epoch in which we live," "involving pictures of all that is best
qualified to interest and to instruct mankind," as he wrote to Byron just after
returning from France and a few months after visiting Mont Blanc.2 9 What
"instruction" might he have in m:ind? In the famous dream vision of Volney's Ruins, the Genius requires all the religions of the world to justify themselves before a tribunal of free people recently liberated from superstition.
But perhaps Volney's reasonable council takes the problem up at the wrong
end. For ifJonathan Israel is right that the Revolution instantiates the political theories of the radical enlightenment, then the issue is not religious sectarianism but rather the power of the state to name religious sectarianism as such: a
power that professes neutrality but reserves for itself the right to decide when
its interests are threatened. On this reading, revolutionary paranoia produces
"religion" as an enemy of the revolution, and thus feels justified in deploying
state-sponsored force to eliminate its enemies. The manufactured possibility
of religious violence justifies the actuality of secular violence. This would be
an appropriately Shelleyan turn of the screw: the Revolution's degeneration
into violence, recrimination, paranoia, and renewed political absolutism is an
imuninent critique of the radical enlightemnent itself From this perspective,
furthering the critique of religion aids the secular violence it claims to combat.
28. Olivier Roy, Secularism Cot•fronts Islam (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) 26. See also
Talal Asad, "Trying to Understand French Secularism," in Hent deVries and Lawrence E.
Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham
UP, 2006) 494-526 (504).
29. Shelley to Byron, September 8, a816, and September 29, 1816. The Complete Works qf
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger lngpen and Walter E. Peck, io vols. Volume 9: Letters 1812j8i8, ed. Roger Ingpen (New York: Gordian P, 1965) 195, 199.
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
623
A truly revolutionary argument, by contrast, would disarticulate the critique of political tyranny from the critique of Christianity. This demands a
critical reading of the radical tradition itself. Shelley may very well have
wished to see the last king strangled with the entrails of the last priest (a remark variously attributed to Voltaire, Diderot, and Meslier), but as a strategy this misses the point rather badly-and moreover the particular way
that it misses the point helps explain why the French Revolution came undone in the way that it did: not only the Terror but Napoleon, years of
war, and finally the "restoration" of thrones across post-Napoleonic
Europe.10 What if the "instruction" Shelley imagines is precisely to make
visible the violence, real and potential, that shadows the presumptively
neutral operations of the state whenever it intervenes in the formation of its
citizens, even when it intervenes to uphold a position-atheism, egalitarian
property rights-which one supports? As if Shelley's point is to remind us,
once again, that the content of beliefs is not the issue.
Here we return to Mont Blanc and the "atheism" that it may or may not
"express." And in doing so we can take Israel's Spinozism more seriously
than he himself does. Necessity is not a type of content, and beliefs are not
causes: what matters are effects. When it comes to both atheisrn and religion
the temptation is always to talk about beliefs, and this is a temptation that
Mont Blanc's many voices, and its textual and literary history, continually
stage. Is Shelley a Platonist? an idealist? a skeptic? What are his ideas? Who
was he reading? At a very basic level the poem insists that none of this
matters; Power, "Remote, serene, and inaccessible" (line 97), is always
there, distributing, withholding, and dispensing "life and death" (line i29).
In such a world, "atheism," no matter how uncompromising, is pseudoradicalism.
Atheism as an Occupation
So the radical enlightenment was not radical enough: it shared with the
moderate enlightenment the habit of viewing religion as a belief in a divine
super-agent, and created thereby the possibility of modem atheism as the
rejection of that super-agent. Once Christianity becomes the collection of
its doctrines, and its function becomes the policing of belief, then there is a
great deal of human life over which the church no longer has authority. It
may police the beliefs of its members, and to a limited extent what they do
3o. A restoration that is one key theme of Proinetheus Unbound. Obviously this does not
mean that Shelley is any more pleased by English "restraint" during the years of the Revolution. England had its own terror, or rather "war on terror" in the 1790s, which, if not
as bloody as the one in France, had its own profound effect on what Kenneth Johnston
has called the "lost generation of the 1790s." See Kenneth R. Johnston, "The Unromantic Lives of Others: the Lost Generation of the 1790s," The 1,1ordsuworth Circle 4o (2009): 6772.
624
COLIN JAGER
with their bodies. But in the West it is generally the state that takes over
the management of embodied life: through various media, through networks of officials and spies, through medical innovations and humanitarian
organizations it observes, measures, distributes, and supervises its subjects."
In this sense early modern Europe witnesses what we can term a "secularization of the body." Driven largely by a reforming impulse internal to
Western Christendom, such secularization organizes and polices corporeal
life. It furthers the process through which the body itself-its positioning,
habituation, and sensory organization-comes to reside outside the boundaries of "religion." Such bodily management cuts off potential alternatives
to a secular order: a religious life now understood largely in nmentalistic
terms can find little use for bodily energies other than to contain and "productively" redirect them. Dualism is our shorthand for this social process,
but dualism goes far beyond Cartesian epistemology; it sinks deeply
enough into our sense of identity that certain kinds of experiences become
literally impossible because the body techniques that were their precondition are no longer operational. The secularized body is in this sense an inexperienced body; some avenues are simply closed to it.32 Could the radical
enlightenment be rethought so as to escape such an end?
"Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist." These words are Shelley's own
first "reading" of his poem. And these three words are of course the radical
enlightenment in a nutshell, especially if we render "philanthropist" more
literally as "lover of mankind" and hear in that phrase a certain libertinism.
Already in Queen Mab Shelley had connected libertinism firmly to political
and religious radicalism. Certainly by 1816 the charge of libertinisin was in
the air wherever he went. 3 And so we might read the signature in the hotel register less as an adolescent attempt to shock than an effort to reinvigorate a collection of philosophical positions that had become, in Shelley's
own analysis, superficial.
Much depends, though, on how the radical enlightenment gets taken
up. Because hotel registers don't usually offer a separate category for "beliefs," Shelley placed his "atheism" under the category of "occupation."
Simple good fortune, perhaps. But it allows us to ask a serious question:
31. See Wolfgang Reinhard, "Rkeformation, Counter-Refornation, and the Early Modem State," Catholic Historical Reviet" 75 (July 1989): 404, 402; and William T. Cavanaugh,
"Does P..eligion Cause Violence?" Haward Divinity Bulletin 35.2-3 (Spring/Sumner 2007):
22-3 5.
32. For the argument that Reform drives secularization, see Taylor, A Secular Age; for the
inexperienced body, see Asad, "Thinking about Religious Belief and Politics."
33. "[l]f we might withdraw the veil of private life, and tell what we now know about
him, it would be indeed a disgusting picture that we should exhibit." John Taylor Coleridge,
rev. of The Revolt of Islan, The Quarterly Review (April 1819): 460-71; reprinted in Shelley:
The Critical Heritage 135.
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
625
what would it mean to understand "atheism" as an occupation-as something that one does rather than something that one is? What if atheism were
not about cognitively-held beliefs or non-beliefs but about postures, arrangements, dispositions, embodied techniques, or disciplined actions?
"Occupation" can mean "the action of taking or maintaining possession
or control of a country, building, land, etc., esp. by (military) force," as the
OED puts it. It can also mean "the state of having one's time or attention
occupied; what a person is engaged in; employment, business; work, toil."
The first meaning is largely spatial, the second largely temporal. In the hotel register, "occupation" means time-and yet the very presence of the
mountain as an occupant of space, registered so consistently in Shelley's
poem, as well as in Mary Shelley's contributions to the History of A Six
Weeks' Tour, where Mont Blanc was first published, hints at the first meaning as well. How can anyone or anything else occupy space when Mont
Blaanc's mass is so insistently there, and when the various military occupations of the region are so fresh in the memory? Even atheism, faced with
such dominant spaces, would retreat to the mind. Indeed, this is exactly
how the Quarterly Revieuw, interrupting its 1818 review of Leigh Hunt's
"Foliage" in order to pounce on Shelley, pictured what had happened. "If
we were told," writes the Quarterly, "of a man who, thus witnessing the
sublimest assemblage of natural objects, should retire to a cabin near and
write aetheos after his name in the album, we hope our own feelings
would be pity rather than disgust." 34 In the Quarterly's imagination, there
was a place in the hotel register for "beliefs," and Shelley, incapable of responding to sublime objects properly, writes "atheist" there-as if his mind
is the "blank" space of nothingness and non-belief still so often taken to be
the poem's own deepest aspiration.35 This picture maps easily onto a secular
distinction in which the mountain forcefully occupies all available space
while doctrines and beliefs are located in the mind and "expressed."
But if the "occupation" of atheism exchanges space for time, a different
set of concepts comes into focus. For occupations, understood temporally,
involve the entire self in the organization of experience. And they centrally
concern what one does with one's body-how it is trained, organized, and
adjusted, what experiences it pursues and cultivates, and what experiences
it forecloses upon.
A passage in Prometheus Unbound, written around the time of the Quarterly's attack, significantly animates the static alpine scenery of Mont Blanc.
34. Poems ofShelley 2: 550; see also Timothy Webb, "'The Avalanche of Ages': Shelley's
Defense of Atheism and Prometheius Unbound" KSMB 35 (1984): 1-39.
35. See most recently, Geoffrey HartI1an, "Gods, Ghosts, and Shelley's 'Atheos,'" Literature and Theology 24.1 (March 2oio): 4-18.
626
COLIN JAGER.
In it, Asia describes a remote Power familiar from the earlier poem, but she
ends with an avalanche
whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake: in Heaven-defying mninds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots: as do the mountains now.36
This looks, at first, like a strictly cognitive revolution--a particularly spectacular example of the technique of drawing imagery from the mind's operations that Shelley had defended in the drama's "Preface": thoughts pile
up in minds until they yield a revolutionary truth. Yet by delaying the analogical "as" so long that snow flakes rather than thoughts seem to be accumulating in the mind, Shelley's syntax manages what William Keach calls a
"disorienting effect." The physical world seems for a moment to penetrate
the mind, suggesting not a simple reversal of priority but an experiential
undoing of any effort to draw lines between the mind and everything outside of it. Shelley's "rejection of dualism," writes Keach, "forms part of the
conceptual basis for a range of practices that are about remaking the world
of human experience by releasing its full potential as a dynarnic and differentiated totality.'
37
The unsettling effect of a language that refuses to distni-
guish between mental life and bodily life might offer a foretaste of the kind
of revolution that would really alter the organization of space. "Liberty,
when men act in bodies, is power," wrote Burke about the French Revolution, glimrpsing from the negative side the kinds of discomfiting potentials
that adhere to an embodied life. For while power may be frozen and
spatialized "on high," as in Mont Blanc (line 127), it might also be put into
motion through the accretion of bodies that like snowflakes eventually become more than the sum of their parts. By "bodies," of course, Burke
meant collections of individuals. But Shelley's syntactical disorientation
takes full advantage of the pun: to act as a body, we must act in a body.
The notorious difficulty of Shelley's writing has its source in the expanded sensory capacities toward which it points-matters of the body as
much as the mind, of sensing and feeling as much as thinking.38 This quality of Shelley's verse has bothered critics from the Monthly Review's pre36. Prometheus Unbound n.iii.37-42; SPP 244.
37. William Keach, "The Political Poet," in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006) 123-42 (37, 123).
38. See Rob Mitchell, "The Transcendental: Deleuze, P. B. Shelley, and the Freedom of
Immobility," Romantic Circles Praxis (January 2008). <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/
deleuze/mitchell/mitchell.htmi laccessed May 7, 20I61>
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
627
scient description of Shelley's "licentiousness of rhythm" to F. R. Leavis'
worry that with Shelley "one accepts the inmuediate feeling and doesn't
slow down to think.'"' Often those hostile to Shelley can see this more
clearly than can those who profess to admire him. In its t819 review of The
Revolt of Islam, for example, the Quarterly Review cogently recognized that
Shelley's danger lay not in the content of his ideas but in what the reviewer
temred his "manner." "We despair," wrote the Quarterly,
of convincing him directly that he has taken up false and pernicious
notions; but if he pays any deference to the common laws of reasoning, we hope to show him that, let the goodness of his cause be what
40
it may, his manner of advocating it is false and unsound.
Shelley, still at work on Prometheus Unbound, had already described his
method of drawing the poem's images from the operations of the human
mind. But after reading this review he added to the "Preface," defending
his "manner" by focusing on its political potential. Aligning himself with
"[t]he peculiar style of intense and comprehensive imagery which distinguishes the modern literature of England" (SPP 207), he writes that the
"power" of such imagery is "general," and the "mass of capabilities remains
at every period materially the same." Changing circumstances, however,
bring images into new alignments, awakening nascent capabilities "to action" (SPP 208).
Mass, power, body, action. We are back at the moving mass of Promne-
theus Unbound's avalanche-a reading of Mont Blanc that extends Shelley's
own first "reading" of the poem in the hotel register. It completes the turn
toward a collective model of revolutionary activity-of people and arguments, of attitudes and habits involving the body as well as the mind. Mont
Blanc's own dense intertextuality sketches the beginnings of that collective
activity, and though allusion-hunting is one of the great games of Mont
Blanc criticism, the point of Shelley's "occupation" is to avoid the temptation of wondering how certain books, authors, and ideas influenced the
poem's ideas; the point, rather, is to picture what it might be like to be a
part of an embodied collective.
"[1JIntil the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and en39. Unsigned review of The Revolt of Islam, The Monthly Review (March 1819): 323-24;
reprinted in Shelley: The CriticalHeritage 123. F. R. Leavis, "Shelley," in Revaluation: Tradition
and Development in Enqlish Poetry (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1998; orig. pub. 1947) 203-32
(207). Leavis grasps from the negative side the power of Shelley's anti-dualism when he
writes of Mont Blanc: "[t]he metaphorical and the actual, the real and the imagined, the inner
and the outer, could hardly be more unsortably and indistinguishably confused" (212).
40. John Taylor Coleridge, The Quarterly Review (April 18t9): 460-71; Shelley: The Critical
Heritage 126.
628
COLIN JAGER
dure," Shelley writes in the "Preface," "reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his
happiness" (SPP 209). He calls love, admiration, trust, hope, and endurance "beautiful idealisms of moral excellence," and it is easy to be misled
by that phrase into cognitive speculations. But in the context of the power
of embodied masses to which Shelley links his use of imagery, these
"idealisrns" look less like what the Quarterly called his "notions" and more
like what it called his "manner": that project of educating the body, increasing its sensory capacities so that anger and hatred and revenge will be
recognized as modes that characterize bodies lacking other, better experiences. To teach the mind to love, adm-ire, trust, hope, and endure, then,
also requires a certain education of the body, and makes possible a reordered sensorium in which such adventures of human flourishing have their
way.
Vacancy
What would an alternative sensorium look like? What kinds of experiences
would differently organized bodies have? These are the questions asked by
Mont Blanc.
Asked, but perhaps not quite answered. Famously, the poem ends with
an enigmatic rhetorical question:
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
(141-43)
Sometimes read as an expression of its author's philosophical idealism, the
question might also be taken as rueful acknowledgment of how hard it is to
"let Mont Blanc be merely a blank," in Frances Ferguson's words. On her
reading, materialism turns out to be impossible: "One can see the mnountain as an example of materiality but cannot see it even as a mountain without seeing it as involving more than matter.' 4 1 To be sure, the poem inight
strive to returm the mountain to a primal blankness beneath the various pious voices that have been attached to it, but as the speaker himself acknowledges early on, the valley is "many-voiced" (line 13), and there is little guarantee that by the end we have stripped away those voices and
uncovered the scene's material "truth."
In "On Life" (i819), the prose fragment inscribed in the back of the
41. Frances Ferguson, "Shefley's Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said," Roonanirism and
Language, ed. Arden Reed (London: Methuen, 1984) 202-14 (203, 21 I).
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
629
notebook that also contains the Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley notes
that his discontent with materialism led him to the opposite extreme, and
the conviction that "nothing exists but as it is perceived" (SPP 5o6). Such a
doctrine "establishes no new truth," he declares, but only "destroys error,
and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the reformer
in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It reduces the mind to
that freedom in which it would have acted but for the misuse of words and
signs, the instruments of its own creation" (SPP 507). Christopher Hitt, in
an intelligent essay, proposes that the "vacancy" this passage celebrates is
the vacancy with which Mont Blanc concludes. 42 Accordingly, the poem insists that error, like the many voices that encircle the mountain and the
"large codes of fraud and woe" (line 8i) that emanate from them, can be
"repealed" (line 8o) by a philosophy that demolishes the old truths without
establishing new ones in their stead.
However appealing such a negative liberty might appear, my argument
has been that when it comes to religion vacancy is not strictly negative. The
state reserves the right to defend its normative vision of things, stepping in
with force or the promise of force whenever "religion" threatens to leave
the domain of private belief The "freedom in which [the mind] would
have acted but for the misuse of words and signs" is a chimnera, a myth of
reason that, as Shelley's own phrasing indicates, licenses destruction in the
name of liberty. And the vacancy that it leaves belhind is the vacancy into
which power steps. The critical consensus that Shelley's poems of late 18 is
and :806 represent a romantic turn away from Godwinian rationalism has
from this perspective not been taken far enough. For Shelley's romantic
turn, registered at the level of syntax and sensory organization as much as of
mind and idea, suggests that the so-called "problem of religion" is itself a
red herring. It has blocked the kind of rethinking so obviously needed in
the aftermath of the French Revolution and prevented the kind of historical analysis that would reveal how caught up secular power is in the creation of its religious opponent. Over and over again, from the so-called
"Wars of Religion" from which Descartes took refuge in his stove-heated
room to the contemporary meddling of Western liberal democracies in the
formation of ideal "Islamic citizens," religion becomes the primary concern
of secular power-almost as if "religion" had been created for just such a
role, for just such a concern. 43 Far from resisting such power, atheism's
fixation on religion furthers its consolidation.
Could the radical enlightenment get over its obsession with religion and
42. Christopher Hitt, "Unwriting Mount Blanc," Texas Studies in Lanqiage and Literature
47.2 (2005): 139-66.
43. On the ideal Islamic citizen, see Saba Mahmood, "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and
Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation," Public Culture 18.2 (2006): 323-47. Western
630
COLIN JAGER.
focus its critical energies on the process that has justified that obsession?
That process is what I have called secularism: not simple neutrality but the
active intervention in religious life by state, civic, and cultural actors. As a
way of life, I have argued, secularism validates a particular organization of
the human sensorium; by remaking religion as a primarily epistemological
concern, a matter of minds rather than of bodies, it reorders the hierarchy
of the senses in accord with its own goals. And this remaking has a politics,
for at some point assimilation inevitably fails, or becomes too volatile and
unpredictable, and then someone is sure to be prodded out of error a little
more forcefully. Underneath that prodding is fear-the fear of the multitude that Warren Montag diagnoses even in Spinoza himself.44 There is of
course plenty to be afraid of, and it is perhaps inevitable that dread of what
might happen when, in Burke's words, "men act in bodies," would cause
even the most fearless of thinkers to reassert the state's juridical power over
the power of the multitude. That is the long history of which the French
fl,evolution forms a particularly instructive chapter. To imagine a Shelley
"after atheism," by contrast, is to imagine a Shelley after secularism. And to
imagine a Shelley after secularism is to imagine the non-coercive peace to
which Prometheus Unbound gives voice in its final act, with its myriad embodied motions on the far side of fear.
In our age of globalized public religion it has become fashionable in
some quarters to plead for a return of the enlightenment. We need another
Hobbes, or another Voltaire. Conjoined to that thought is generally another one: that what came after the enlightenment-that is, romanticismis in some indirect way responsible for what currently ails us: our reflexive
obeisance to identity, difference, and cultural autonomy, and our collective
failure of nerve when it comes tine to stand up for universal values.
Mark Lilla's 2007 book The Stillborn God makes this case directly and
compellingly. In Lilla's account, the broad romantic tradition stretching
from Rousseau through Schleiermacher to nineteenth-century German
meddling has helped to create the climate in which radical Islam can flourish: Iran in 1953,
Indonesia in t965, Afghanistan in the 198os, Algeria and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and of
course Israel/Palestine throughout the second half of the twentieth century. For variations on
this notion see Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
(New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009) i02-6. See also William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth
of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford UP,
2009).
44. Warren Montag, "Who's Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the
State," The South Atlantic Quarterly 104.4 (Fall,
2005):
655-73 (670). For a compelling and
original analysis of the "counter-power" of the crowd in the romantic era, see David
Collings, Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 178o--1848 (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2o09).
SHELLEY AFTER ATHEISM
631
liberal theology discovered the power of individual consciousness and
wedded it to notions of cultural and national difference, thereby unleashing
a series of political messianisns-nationalism, communism, fascism, and
fundamnentalismr-that it was unequipped to handle. 5 An influential source
for this kind of analysis is Isaiah Berlin, whose various accounts of what he
termed the "Counter-Enlightenment" came close to pinning National Socialism on Hamann and Herder. 46 From here it is but a short step to the
work of liberal hawks like Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Paul
Berman, for whom the defense of the enlightenment and the defeat of terrorism require that we repudiate our romantic impulses in favor of a
militant-and military-backed--secularism. For them, the line friom Ro47
manticism to Fascism to "Islamo-fascism" is apparently easy to see.
These analyses are wrong on both counts. To think of religion as something from which secularism will save us is to misunderstand how secularism helped to create religion in the first place, and to forget how political
and n-ilitary intervention continues to shape the fonis that "religion" assurnes. And to think of romanticism as simply theorizing the return of public religion is to underestimate romanticism's critical capacities. Shelley's
romanticism, I have argued, amounts to a critical reading of its own enlightenment sources, and an intimation of what might lie on their far shore.
Rutgers University
45. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and lte Modern lVest (New York:
Knopf, 2007).
46. Isaiah Berlin, "The Counter-Enlightenuent," in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking P, [980) 1-24; Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of
the North: J. G. Hamann and rite Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. Henry Hardy (London:
John Murray, 1993).
47. See for example Hirsi Ali's description of the "enenmies of reason in the West: religion
and the R1-omantic movement," in "Blind Faiths," New York Times review of Lee Harris, The
Suicide of Reason: Radical Islatn's Threat to the West (January 6, 2oo8): 14-15. Berman argues
that Islamism is a form of fascism derived in part from a romantic reading of the Qu'ran
"influenced by Coleridge." See Paul Bernan, "Who's Afraid Of Tariq R.amadan?" The
New Republic, June 4, 2007. <http://www.tnr.com/article/who%E2%8o%99s-afraid-tariqra,nadan [accessed May 17, 20ol]> This essay forms the core of Berman's new book, The
Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House, 2oito).
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Author: Jager,Colin
Title: Shelley After Atheism
Source: Stud Romanticism 49 no4 Wint 2010 p. 611-31
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